How to Create Custom Screeners

Introduction

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Hello this is Ken Leoni VP of marketing at Stock Rover and in this video, I’ll show you how to create Stock Rover screeners. Screeners will find a set of candidate investment ideas from a larger investment universe of Stocks or ETFs. Screeners “screen” according to the investment criteria you care about.

If you are new to screening, you may want to first take advantage of the many screeners that come with Stock Rover. Stock Rover starts you off with 14 Screeners in the Navigation pane.

To learn more about these 14 screeners, you’ll want to check out our Stock Rover Screener Tour Video, https://www.stockrover.com/videos/stock-rover-screener-tour/

In addition, there are well over 100 screeners available to you in the Stock Rover Library, which can be easily added to your account via a simple import operation.

Stock Rover’s screeners can be implemented as is or you can update them to make them better fit your own investment criteria. You can also use them as the basis for new screeners.

If you make changes to a Stock Rover screener and later want to revert back, simply reimport the screener from the Library.

Before delving into the “how to”, let’s talk a little bit about how the screening capabilities of Stock Rover will vary depending on your subscription plan, https://www.stockrover.com/plans/compare.

The Stock Rover Subscription Plan determines the number of metrics available for screening.

Premium and Premium Plus support ETF screening. With Premium, there are over 90 ETF metrics to screen on. With Premium Plus, over 180.

Ranked Screening is unique to Stock Rover and allows you to assign a level of importance to metrics, to “weight” them if you will. And then from the weighted criteria, compute the overall rank. If 50 stocks pass a screener, you would see them ranked 1 to 50. Ranking helps you narrow down a vast field of tickers and tells you which ones to focus on. For example, you could tell Stock Rover to return a Top 10 list.

Premium Plus allows you to screen on historical data.

Premium Plus also offers up a powerful equation screener.

Build a screener – Essentials

What we are going to do now is build three separates screeners based on a GARP strategy or Growth at a Reasonable Price. For more detail on Investing with a GARP Investment Strategy. Please see:

https://www.stockrover.com/blog/stock-research/investing-with-garp-growth-at-a-reasonable-price/

We’ll start with an Essentials screener, we’ll then graduate to a Premium Screener, and then finish with a Premium Plus screener.

So, the first thing I’ll want to do is switch our trial from a Premium Plus to an Essentials. I’ll go to “Change Trial” and select Essentials. Note in the upper righthand corner we can see we are now set to an Essentials Trial.

Now, to create a screener we can just go to “Screeners”, right click, and “Create Screener”.

Notice we can select the “Equity Type” and the “Universe” we will be selecting from. I’ll select “All Exchanges”.

Let’s start with the “Add Criteria” button. The first thing I’d like to do, especially when working with Stock Rover’s out-of-box metrics is to build a list of the metrics I want to incorporate into the screener, then I’ll go back later and assign thresholds.

In this screener I want to screen on the following metrics – again all these metrics are part of the Stock Rover Essentials Plan

We want to incorporate

  • PEG Forward
  • PEG Trailing

Sales 1 year and the Sales 5-year annualized growth. Note I can search for Sales. Notice in the right pane you get a description.

We want to incorporate

  • Sales 1 – Year Chg (%)
  • Sales 5 – Year Avg(%)

I’d like to grab some earning per share metrics and screen them as well. I can sort the columns.

  • EPS 1 – Year Chg(%)
  • EPS 5 – Year Avg(%)
  • EPS Next Year Chg (Est%)

We are also interested in operating income. We are interested in the 5-year average.

Lastly, we’ll grab the Earnings Yield

Now that we’ve selected these metrics lets assign some thresholds.

I’ll set PEG Forward & PEG trailing to be under 1.5

Note at the bottom there is a pane where we have a column for each metric that we are evaluating

We also see how many stocks are passing our screening criteria

So, we are at 258 out of 15,928

This pane is showing us a 20-stock preview, now to see all the stocks and to perform proper analytics, the proper workflow is to go to the Table Layout, which I’ll show once we’ve completed the screener.

To learn more about the Table Layout please see this link here:

https://www.stockrover.com/help/table-overview/

and there are also some great videos as well:

https://www.stockrover.com/category/videos/getting-started/

Let’s go back and we’ll want to set our Sales 1 year and the Sales 5-year annualized growth metrics to be above 4%

We want Earnings 1 year, Earnings 5-year annualized growth, and Earnings for next year to exceed 8%, so let’s set those values.

We want our operating income growth over the last 5 years to exceed 8% on average.

Lastly, we want the P/E to be under 25, and that is expressed as requiring an earnings yield of over 4%.

I tend to build a list of all my metrics and then set the thresholds when working with metrics where I’m setting simple thresholds, but you can just as well pick a metric and then pick a threshold or whatever combination best works for you. We’ll save the screener.

We can now go to the Table Layout for further research and analysis of our screened tickers. Note that you can pick the View that you would like, you can also create your own Views or import Views from the Stock Rover Library.

We can select tickers to Chart and notice we get more detail in the Insight Panel.

Build a screener – Premium

Now let’s graduate to a Premium Screener

Actually, before switching to Premium from Essentials, I’ll try to update my screener with a Premium metric. I’ll go to my Essential screener. I’ll “Update” the screener and I’ll “Add Criteria” and I’ll pick a historical metric Sales Quarter over quarter. You can see it is the quarter over change in sales between this quarter and the same fiscal quarter one year ago. We’ll screen if it is greater than 8% and Stock Rover tells us that this is a feature that requires a Premium Subscription.

So, changing the Trial Level is very helpful in determining which Stock Rover subscription plan is best suited to your requirements. So, let’s go to Premium. Right now, we have our Essentials screener picked and we can see we have 22 rows in our table. If I switch to the Table View here that is 22 tickers that met our screening criteria for our GARP screener based on Stock Rover Essentials.

I am going to click on this GARP Premium Screener and note how the row count has changed from 22 to 45. I want to change my view here and you’ll see that I’ve incorporated some more metrics.

Now, in the interest of time, I’ve already created this screener using Premium metrics.

The process is exactly the same as we did before. So, this identical to what we did earlier, I simply chose some additional metrics.

Morningstar Growth Grade, has been added which must be an “A” or a “B”

Sales and EPS Quarter over quarter change, this year vs. same period last year for the most recent quarter (remember we tried to add earlier as an Essentials but couldn’t).

Passing companies need to show more than a 4% Quarter over quarter sales gain and more than an 8% Quarter over quarter earnings gain.

When we go to the Table Layout, we can see that our tickers are listed alphabetically.
Let’s go back and revise this screener and add a very powerful Premium capability, it is called Ranking. Ranking allows you to order the stocks that pass the screener by weighting the criteria used in the screener for importance and then from the weighted criteria rankings, computing the overall rank. When I go to edit my Sales quarter over quarter change, we see an additional value called weight percent. I am going to assign Sales quarter over quarter change a 5% weight, we’ll do the same thing for Earnings Per Share quarter over quarter – 5%. Now there’s quite a few metrics here, so I am going to cheat a little bit. I am going to click on cancel here and you’ll see here that I already have a screener that I’ve added all the weighting to.

Notice how we rank based on a specific threshold as well as Lowest to Highest Values

Also, there is a limit that is currently set to 50, we could implement a top 10 or top 25. If you have a screener that returns a large population adding ranking helps you target tickers that best meet your criteria.

Here is a link that explains ranking in quite a bit more detail.

https://www.stockrover.com/help/ranking-a-screener/

I am going to change the limit for 50 to 25 and let’s see what happens. Notice now we have 25 tickers that met our criteria. I am going to sort it based on rank and we can see that Quidel is #1 and we can see why it ranked #1, based on the ranking criteria.

Build a screener – Premium Plus

Let’s finish up with a GARP Premium Plus Screener

The Premium Plus screener builds upon the Premium screener by adding in two additional key Premium Plus features:

  1. the ability to access historical periods
  2. the ability to write equations.

In the interest of time, I’ll highlight the Essential, Premium and Premium Plus Metrics. In addition, you’ll see something new called equations.

Let’s see how to create a screen based on an equation.

I’ll simply pick an existing equation and update it. When creating an equation from scratch we’ll click on the Add Freeform Equation. We’ll create an equation that says earnings per share of the most recent period is greater than the earnings per share trailing twelve months 1 year ago.

I’ll search for Earning Per Share and you’ll note there is something that says “Now”. When we go to the pulldown, we can see that this is historical data. So, Stock Rover in an equation can reference the Earnings Per Share “Now”, the most recent quarter, the trailing twelve months for year 1 to year 5, we can go back 10 calendar years, and 9 quarters.

We’ll set EPS[Now]> EPS[TTM1] and update. What we can see in this screener we are looking at EPS[Now]> EPS[TTM1] and EPS[TTM1]> EPS[TTM2]

Here is a link that you’ll find quite helpful, you’ll see on this page a PDF and Word doc that provide additional guidance and tips for creating custom equations.

https://www.stockrover.com/help/equation-screener/

In this screener we’ve added some very specific criteria that allows us to be very granular in our targeting
The expected sales growth next year must exceed 2%
EPS must be increasing over the last 2 years
Sales must be increasing over the last 2 years
Operating income must be increasing over the last 2 years
The expected EPS growth next year must exceed 4%
The industry growth decile must be in the top 40% for the company within its industry
The 5 Year Growth Estimate is used in the rankings with a weighting of 5%
The Stock Rover growth and value scores must both be in the top 50% of companies
The Margin of Safety must exceed 5%
The Price to Lynch Fair Value metric is used in the rankings with a weighting of 10%
Let’s now go to the Table View. This view is showing us both past and future performance. Let’s sort on “Ranking”.

Again, Quidel is ranked #1 the tooltip is showing how Quidel did against the screener criteria, which helps you understand why it ranked #1 in the screener.

Conclusion

Stock Rover’s powerful and flexible screener helps you quickly narrow down a population of thousands of stocks to a more selective set of investment opportunities that meets even the most stringent of investment criteria.

Stock Rover’s advanced screening comes with ranking, historical comparison, and freeform equations which provide for maximum flexibility and range, allowing you to locate your best investment opportunities in no time.

We hope you found this video informative, thank you for watching.